As Pieter mentioned in the previous post, I am stepping in as a person-in-charge at Wikidot. Pieter has been leading the project for a long time (he came on-board not more than a year after Wikidot.com launched) and now he is moving to his other promising projects. During past months Wikidot benefited from several great contributions and improvements by Pieter, and I believe what Wikidot is now is undeniably also thanks to Pieter's engagement. Thanks and good luck!

Over the last year we've been working, at Wikidot, on creating more general tools for building Wikidot-based applications. For me as CEO, applications was always the way to bring a mass audience to Wikidot. It's how Microsoft conquered the desktop, with Visual Basic for Windows. It's how Apple bit into the smartphone market. Gaming communities and Snow Leopard sites do create volume but it's superficial. They don't use Wikidot except for text and images, and they can pick up and leave in a second (and they do).

Yesterday I got a distressed email from a contributor to a community whose master admin appears to have gone slightly crazy. Deleting pages and threatening to delete the entire site. Sadly, we get this kind of thing quite regularly. Which made me think that there is something wrong with the model that gives a single person life-and-death control over an entire community.

jhubertwrites: As of late, Wikidot.Com has been under ever-more intensive attack by spammers, who add links to innocent wikis leading to sites attempting to sell you PhD theses, used cars, pool supplies, and even more dubious offers. This has led many site admins to desperate measures such as locking parts of their wiki or even restricting them to members only, harming the spirit of openness that is the very foundation of the wiki community.

There is a bug in the Wikidot syntaxone that's been annoying me for agesand I'd like to get your opinion on it. As you can see from this paragraph, a double hyphen (used as em-dash) gets treated as 'strikethrough'. This means that correct English writing gets messed up. It also means that text which contains an em-dash (—) can't be struck-through.

Yesterday we sent out emails to site admins who are still using one of the old IP addresses in their custom domain DNS 'A' records. It's been some time that ping wikidot.com returns the new IP address and now we're switching off that old front-end IP address.

Another Tuesday, another rant. To be honest I've been lazy with the blog lately. Anyhow, this week we're focussing on the bug tracker, clearing out as many issues as possible. My own contribution has been to change the theme to Cherry Red Deep Blue.